Five things

Sharlene Ramos-Chesnes took what many would agree is a very nontraditional path to entrepreneurship.

The daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, Ramos-Chesnes grew up in a predominately Hispanic neighborhood on Cleveland's near West Side. She spoke Spanish at home, at school and at church and attended a bilingual school. The first time she ate non-Spanish food was as a freshman at Kent State University, where she studied fashion merchandising.

After college, Ramos-Chesnes designed department store windows in downtown Cleveland until many of those shops disappeared. She then managed a nonprofit family resource center in Ashtabula County and later ran the foreign language department at Old Trail School in Bath. In the early 2000s, however, Ramos-Chesnes spotted a market need and made the leap to business owner.

At the time, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was still relatively new, and American companies were figuring out how to manage the emerging business opportunities with their southern neighbors. Language was a big hurdle, according to Ramos-Chesnes, who was moonlighting as a translator on calls between the logistics company where her husband, Mark, worked, and its Mexican customers.

Communication was "just something people did not think about when trade opened up," she said. "It just made sense that we should open a company that offered language and logistics together. … We were doing it anyway. We might as well do it for ourselves."

The couple launched InterChez in 2002 out of their Stow basement. Now, in its 15th year and with 30 employees, InterChez is a family of companies that does everything from helping businesses with translation and interpretation to managing their transportation needs and auditing their freight bills.

"We are the only logistics company today that still continues to offer language, and we have over 150 dialects represented," said Ramos-Chesnes, who believes much of the company's success is tied to its lean operation. "Everything we have done as we have grown has been due to our customers asking us to do it."

As a business owner, Ramos-Chesnes attributes her personal drive to a desire to create a "vibrant company," where employees can prosper and support themselves and their families. Growing up, she said, new Puerto Rican immigrants were welcome in her home and lived with the family. Her father often took young immigrants to work with him and made sure the newcomers got a job of their own. The impulse to pay it forward, she said, is ingrained.

She also calls upon the lessons learned in the five years she operated a nonprofit family resource center out of the former Thurgood Marshall Elementary School in Ashtabula — not the least of which is the importance of using local resources.

The Kent State grad has a close relationship with her alma mater. Many of Kent State's graduate-level translation students, for example, intern with InterChez. Some are offered jobs following the internship, while InterChez has become the first customer for a handful of others who chose to open their own translation businesses.

Ramos-Chesnes also recently completed a one-year appointment as the university's 2016 President's Ambassador, where she was charged with helping promote cultural and mutual respect among diverse constituencies of students, staff, faculty and administrators, and she established the Chesnes Family Endowment Scholarship in 2014. The scholarship is given annually to an "under-resourced" Hispanic collegian at Kent State.

Geraldine Nelson, executive director of human resources, employee engagement and outreach for Kent State, has sat with Ramos-Chesnes on speaker panels and worked alongside the executive as part of the college's Latino Networking Caucus. Nelson said the university has been fortunate to have the support of a grad like Ramos-Chesnes, who as easily connects with minority students as business school professors and university officials.

"When Sharlene comes to the table what you see is someone being very proud of bringing the Hispanic culture to light and keeping that culture alive," Nelson said.